The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South

by Broadus Mitchell

This opinion is not so categorical as that of a close observer of the South who believes that "from 1810 to 1880 the section was industrially a desert of Sahara", but it makes clear the view that from a point early in the century until a date subsequent to the Civil War absorption in cotton culture threw manufacturing of all sorts into the discard. This conception may be held to be so generally accepted as to be commonplace and not requiring of proof; to examine in detail, however, the varying statements that would cast doubt upon this, so far from being a tilting at windmills, will serve to fix with some conclusiveness the date most nearly according with the commencement of the industry, and so accomplish the chief object of this introductory discussion.

And now to begin.

In declaring in 1908 that Spartanburg was regaining the position of a central point in one of the most forward manufacturing developments in America, such as the place had been a century earlier, Mr. Tompkins said: "When I left South Carolina to go North to learn the trade of machinist and to study engineering I thought I was leaving a country which had never had any important manufactures. Later, when I was in the middle of industrial life in the North, I conceived the idea of writing an industrial history of the United States. To my amazement I found that the agricultural South, from which I had come in a spirit of industrial despair, was the cradle of manufactures in the United States."[3]

Mr. Thompson has developed carefully the industrial character of what may roughly be called the Revolutionary period, particularly with reference to North Carolina: "The domestic industries ... flourished. Though there were no towns of any size, the number and the skill of the artisans was such that, in 1800, it seemed probable that the logical development would be into a frugal manufacturing community, rather than into an agricultural state."[4] Records in the office of the Secretary of State of South Carolina show the early encouragement given to the manufacture of cotton specifically. In a list of inventions, copyrights and patents, it appears that March 13, 1789, Hugh Templeton deposited in the office two plans, "a complete draft of a carding machine that will card eighty pounds of cotton per day", and "a complete draft of a spinning machine, with eighty-four spindles, that will spin with one man's attendance ten pounds of good cotton yarn per day."[5] In 1795 the legislature of this State passed an act authorizing commissioners to project a lottery for the benefit of William McClure in his effort to establish a cotton manufactory to make "Manchester wares."[6] The purchase by Southern States of the patent rights of Whitney's cotton gin is to be interpreted not as a design to leave off cotton manufacturing, but rather as an evidence of a prevalent spirit for mechanical improvement. A South Carolina appropriation bill for 1809 has a paragraph advancing to Ephraim McBride $1000. "to enable him to construct a spinning machine on the principles mentioned in a patent he holds from the United States."[7]

Much of this may be believed to have been directly in consequence of the necessity for economic self-sufficiency during the Revolution when the colonial commerce with England was stopped. Proceedings of the Safety Committee in Chowan county, North Carolina, for March 4, 1775, show that "the committee met at the house of Captain James Sumner and the gentlemen appointed at a former meeting of directors to promote subscriptions for the encouragement of manufactures, informed the committee that the sum of eighty pounds sterling was subscribed by the inhabitants of this county for that laudable purpose." Prizes were offered to encourage the manufacture of woolen and cotton cards and of steel, and proclamation money to the amount of ten pounds would be given by the chairman of the committee to the first producer in a certain time of fulled woolen cloth. The provincial congress the same year took steps to stimulate, by bounties, the manufacture of gunpowder, rolling and slitting mill products, cotton cards of wire, merchantable steel, paper, woolen cloth and pig iron.[8]

Although it is said that their objects were possibly political as well as industrial, mechanics' societies existed at Charleston and Augusta before and about the year 1810; in Augusta were made some of the earliest attempts in this country to improve the steam engine.[9] As early as 1770 there was formed in South Carolina a committee to establish and promote manufactures, with Henry Laurens as chairman.[10]

Before making an estimate of the character of the textile industry in the South in this Revolutionary period, it is well to take a glimpse at some of the individual establishments. The facts brought out by Mr. Kohn's painstaking research as to South Carolina serve well. Governor Glen's "Answers to the Lords of Trade", believed to have been written in 1748, in attributing some manufacture of stuffs like Irish linen to the inhabitants of the Irish township of Williamsburgh, can have no point except to indicate domestic industry.[11] Remarking the considerable manufacture of cloth in the province prior to and during the Revolutionary period, it is pointed out that "In those days it does not appear to have been popular to organize corporations and the manufacturing was done by individuals—most of the planters being amply able to conduct such operations."[12] Daniel Heyward, a planter, in a letter in 1777, declared with reference to his "manufactory" that if cards were to be had "there is not the least doubt but that we could make six thousand yards of good cloth in the year from the time we began." And Mr. Kohn comments, "This certainly shows that the Heywards conducted a considerable plant for the manufacture of cotton goods", and allows that "no doubt other individual planters made their own cotton clothes in the same way."[13]

Domestic production is clearly seen in a statement in the same year that a planter to the northward in three months trained thirty negroes to make one hundred and twenty yards of cotton and woolen cloth per week, employing a white woman to instruct in spinning and a white man in weaving. "He expects to have it in his power not only to cloathe his own negroes, but soon to supply his neighbors."[14]

This student has satisfied himself, in spite of the admitted fact that no traces of the plant survive, that "in 1778 Mrs. Ramage, a widow, living on James Island, Charleston District, established a regular cotton mill, which was operated by mule power."[15] Another plant which would seem to have approached a commercial character is seen in the assertion in 1790 that "A gentleman of great mechanical knowledge and instructed in most of the branches of cotton manufactures in Europe, has already fixed, completed and now at work on the high hills of the Santee, near Stateburg, and which go by water, ginning (?) carding and slubbing machines; also spinning machines, with 84 spindles each, and several other useful implements for manufacturing every necessary article in cotton."[16] Detail description shows, however, that while some long staple cotton for this establishment was imported from the West Indies, and while a variety of goods were made, it was conducted as an adjunct to a plantation, parts of the equipment were later removed to and set up on another plantation, and much yarn was spun for persons in the vicinity. It is, however, notable that the machinery was made in North Carolina.[17]

It has been said probably very justly that "It was not until far in the nineteenth century that manufactured cloth could be bought because of its scarcity and because of its price, and a vast majority of our grand-mothers were thus forced to make their own cloth, and many of them preferred the domestic article to the manufactured,"[18] and Mr. Clark says that "prior to the war of 1812 the advance of Southern manufactures was principally in what were then household arts—those that produced for the subsistence of the family rather than for an outside market. These manufactures continued generalized and dispersed rather than specialized and integrated."[19]